Presence and Absence
by Emily31594
Summary: A series of three pieces set as Robin and Regina struggle with their separation by Storybrooke's magical barrier.
1. Presence and Absence

Regina is relieved, when she finally reaches her bed that night, that they have no memories in this room. (That is a lie; he is everywhere, colored her whole life, and his absence has rendered everything grey again.) But _they _have never been in this room together, it is not her office, or her vault, as absurd as it was to spend the night together beside potions and runes and slabs of stone. This is a place blessedly quiet and empty of the ghosts of his words and his touch.

She hovers at the door for a moment and finds that she is…tired. So, she coaxes herself into her usual routine, hangs her jacket in its proper place, sets her boots on their shelf, climbs the stairs at a determinedly normal rate, changes her sweater and trousers for silk pajamas and a cashmere robe. She replaces her necklace and earrings in their cases, pumps soap onto her hands and wipes off her makeup, cups cool water in her hands to wash it away, smooths moisturizer over her skin.

Her routine buys her twenty minutes of thoughtlessness, and then…there has to be a _next. _

That next is what breaks her.

Turn on the lamp, she thinks. Turn off the main light, pull back the covers, get into beg. She plugs her phone into its charger. Settles into the sheets, smoothes them, gathers her hair over one shoulder, and then…

Nothing.

She reaches, presses the call button on her phone to light the screen. Two missed calls, both from Snow. And one message. She's not going to return that call tonight. Or listen to the message. A hope speech is not going to fix anything. (It's nice—she'd never admit it out loud, but it's nice to have that missed call anyway, lighting up her screen, filling the void.) Henry has texted her from the next room—such a teenager, she thinks, and the thought tugs half a smile from her lips. _Operation Mongoose tomorrow! _it reads, _Love you! _

She types her son a response, that smile still peeking through. _Goodnight, Henry. I love you. S_ighs, sets her phone back on the bedside table.

Her eyes fall shut, and a second later, she registers her phone screen going dark, leaving only dim moonlight, and the red of the numbers on her clock that tell her it's been nearly eight hours since he left.

Should she avoid memories, she wonders, or seek them out? (It does not matter, _they_ seek her, they will not be quietened.)

Is Robin in a hotel somewhere? That small one on the side of the road just past Storybrooke, the one with two stories and creaking doors painted that nauseating shade of peach? Or have they walked farther already?

She imagines him closer, at the hotel she can picture. Imagines him there, in darkness like this. Thinking of her or trying not to? Desperate or quiet?

Desperate, she thinks, her jaw tightening. He'll have been calm for Roland all day, and now that the boy's asleep, there will be tears like those he cried just this afternoon, against her cheek. Silent tears, heartrending and desperate, reaching for that one last thing, the idea that might save them all from this.

A few weeks ago she might have convinced herself that he was trying to forget her, to live the lovely life he could have with his wife and their son. Or at least that he _would, _soon, that time would set him free of whatever connection he'd felt them to have.

She doesn't think that anymore.

That was his last, best gift to her, and his final, irrevocable curse. How will she live—_again_—with having given someone pain for loving her?

What does it say about her, that the farthest her tears have gotten is the dampness at the edge of her eyes, when she knows, can picture so horribly, painfully easily the way his teeth are digging into his bottom lip right now, the way he's clenching his jaw against its trembling, the way he's letting his eyes drop shut so he can picture her smile? Why _her _smile, why _her_?

What does it say about her that Robin guarded that scrap of their unchosen path, and she could not bear to look at it?

She tilts her chin, turns her face halfway into her pillow to fight the uncomfortable knots tightening in her chest, and she feels the ghost of Robin's fingers cupping her jaw, lifting her face, catching her eyes, can almost remember the cadence of his voice just this afternoon, _I choose you_ and everything unknotting and soaring. Now, it feels as if someone's promised her a beautiful view only to shove her off the cliff when she stepped too close to the edge.

It's almost funny.

Or at least, it must be to the author, because why else would she have found those empty books that led to the hope now flickering in her chest?

The hope that means she is not happy, but cannot give in to being cold, either.

It is a grudging admission that this is what Robin would want. He would want her to be open to happiness, with or without him.

Insufferable, arrogant, frustrating, wonderful thief.

And that is when the tears finally come.


	2. Weight

Her anger is all she has. Without it, she is weak. Pathetic. The girl who couldn't stop herself from saving the child who would destroy her happiness. The daughter too weak to have a life of her own. The lover too dangerous to love.

She has not even seen his face, and yet she can feel it between them. A pull, a tug, as though that hand with the lion tattoo has found hers and is reaching, grasping, enveloping.

His laugh is full and warm and booming, even from the door, his strong jaw shaking with it, and she can tell he would take it all from her, lift all of that weight. Smile and smile at her until she smiled too, and she would forget her pain and her anger.

She doesn't want to forget.

Even the thought is overwhelming, nearly destroys her. To forget the thing that defines her, the revenge that has kept her on that perilous edge and not throwing herself off her balcony. The anger that has given her fraying mind something to hold onto amidst the loneliness of existing as a lifeless possession of the King, the taunts of her magic tutor. If she gives in to this pull, he will take all of that from her, and then where will she be?

In the stables, again. Watching helplessly as love transforms to dust, powerless to stop it. Weightless, ungrounded. Weak.

(Terrified.)

She runs.

—

She was wrong.

She does not find that out until years and years later, more than thirty of them.

But now she knows it without a doubt. She was wrong.

She'd thought—she'd all but_ known_—that loving him would've been light, freeing, that she would've forgotten her anger and fear and pain.

And yet, few things in her life have ever felt so heavy as their love.

She lo…has feelings for him. Of course she does; her soulmate, the man her battered heart is fated to love, no matter when, or where they meet.

But Robin, oh Robin, and the way he confesses his love as though it isn't something wrong and shameful, as though it doesn't contradict everything he believes in. That is a burden heavier than she could have imagined.

_Forget about me_, she begs him, her heart splintering like the tavern door she nearly broke. _Stay away from me_, she pleads, all while her traitorous heart pounds at his nearness, at his rich, broken voice and his sea blue eyes. It's that same feeling from before, the pull between them, but for every time they have touched and spoken and connected they have made it heavier, and now she fears he will not be able to escape.

—

_I—I know_.

She could not look at him at first, tried to stare at the paint instead, the meaningless, inviolable line that will soon separate them more surely than even her fear and that paneled wooden door once did.

He cannot leave without spinning back around (that bond, he cannot escape it, they cannot escape it, she had always known), holds her and kisses her one last time and looks into her eyes as though he could search out something in them that will save them all.

He fails.

The town line severs them, cuts them cruelly apart, a barrier forever.

She can still see him as he backs away to his family, but he cannot see her. He looks still, missing her eyes, of course he does, he will never know them again.

She turns away before he is out of sight. Why bother watching? She can feel already how the weight between them changes, the bliss of _I choose you_morphing. Like page 23 as she tears it up and leaves it to the wind, to blow away like she thought she would back when they might've had a chance, when all it really does is haunt her still, torture her with possibility.

And as she sits at the counter at Granny's, sloshing cold, half-drunk coffee around the corners of her mug, that old weight settles in. Not the heavy, comforting weight of Robin and his love and his faith. Not even anger and hatred and the desire for revenge. The weight is her pain, the pain that has never really left her, for she was granted only those very few seconds today in which she believed she might have a chance at happiness. It has been decades since she trusted that, and she has been proven herself wrong to do so. (She does not believe that. She is still helplessly glad that she met him, and loved him; that he loved her.)

With all of her being, as the pain sinks into her limbs and fills her lungs with her every breath, she wishes for the weight of his presence instead.


	3. Numbers

_I'm sure canon will destroy this story in some way, but until then…_

_Thanks ninzied for the little conversation we had about this._

I

Her number has lit up the screen of Robin's cheap burner phone dozens of times, since the day he acquired it and stopped himself from immediately typing the digits into the contacts folder. Whenever they have to navigate some new challenge, opening a bank account or exchanging the keys to the apartment they've rented, he finds his thumb absent-mindedly tracing over the keys, a perfected nervous habit.

On the good days, he stops himself from actually pressing on the keys. On the bad ones, well…

He just wants to hear her voice.

Sometimes, he almost manages to convince himself that a text message couldn't possibly hurt. Wouldn't he like to know, in her position, that they've made it to New York City, that he has a job and Marian's interviewing for one next week, that they've placed Roland in a school where he's making friends, that they have enough money and the map helped them make their way and that they are grateful? But then he wonders…would he?

_We're all right. R. _he types out once, and he's halfway to typing her number into the send box before he presses the cancel button twice and stares as the screen goes blank, his message lost like everything else between them, banished to the realm of not-the-right-timing, never-to-be.

That night, he tries to picture her receiving a call from him, an unknown number lighting the screen of the BlackBerry where it rests on her beside table. He pictures her turning on her side to retrieve it, lifting the phone and yanking out the charger cable, her brow furrowing as she presses the talk button and holds the phone to her ear.

He imagines the rough, warm texture of her voice saying _Hello_, the way his name would become a hopeful, broken question on her lips when he first spoke.

He imagines telling her about his life, about Roland's school and the way he's started to drink black coffee rather than tea because it reminds him of her, and the beautiful trees in the park beside them that would make him feel at home if only anywhere could feel like home without her. He imagines her chuckle as he tells her about the owner of the ice cream shop down the street who is absolutely entranced with his son.

But then he remembers that she'll never see any of it, not the trees or the coffee or the shop. Not Roland. Not him.

And he imagines her breathtaking smile and wonders if a phone call from him would even be able to tease it out, because at some point, after telling each other about the separate lives they won't be able to share, the phone call would have to end.

He would be too weak, far too weak to do that himself. He would talk on and on so it wouldn't have to end, and his fingers would turn white from clinging to the phone, and he would beg her to tell him one more story, to stay for just a moment more.

She would have to be the one to hang up, to say goodbye. She would be the one to interrupt his _I love you_ with _I know _before he could get past the first word, because she does, and it isn't fair. and It hurts to hear him say it, and he's caused her enough misery for a lifetime.

He wouldn't be able to stop himself from saying it, anyway.

So he types in the numbers and doesn't dial, and the number of days since he last saw her, since he lifted his forehead from hers and her fingers fell from his grasp, climbs.

II

Regina goes back for it at dusk, just as the sun is disappearing behind the horizon.

She had walked away with a set jaw, clenching and unclenching her hands, trying to bring a halt to the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes, but this time, as she walks in solitude from her car to the invisible wall through which Robin and his family vanished, she allows the tears to fall freely. There is no one to see, no one but herself to judge as she bends down to gather the broken pieces of the chance she waited too long to take.

She retrieves the torn papers quickly, desperate to have the task over with, ashamed that she tore the page up, and that she's back to retrieve it, as her eyes search the darkening, leaf-scattered ground. She tries so hard not to look at the fragmented images of her younger self leaning into a younger Robin, of the hint of a smile on her lips, of the way that this Robin looks as drawn to her as he has ever been.

She does not allow herself to glance up at the empty expanse of road before her.

When she reaches town, it is already fully dark. Emma had offered that Henry spend the afternoon and early evening at her place, to give Regina a chance to catch her breath, an offer that Regina had, for once, agreed to almost easily.

It does, however, mean that the house she enters is dark, silent, and empty.

She waves a hand carelessly towards the fireplace, hesitant to make the room fully light when she knows all it will reveal is the emptiness. A small fire springs to life on the half-burned logs.

She rifles through a drawer of old craft things until her fingers come upon a large roll of clear tape from one of Henry's science projects.

She lays out the tape, and then the shards of the page on the coffee table before the fire, glances at the sideboard, and rises to pour herself a tumbler of whiskey. If she's going to wallow, she may as well do it properly.

In an hour, she has pieced the page back together, the image of Robin Hood and the not-yet-evil Queen almost whole again. Her last gift from him.

(Her last gift from him was _I choose you_, the dangerous, beautiful, impossible words he left her just as the same thing happened that always does, and fate saw fit to rip happiness from her right when she had begun to believe she could have it.)

She will not tell anyone what Robin said to her in the seconds before Marian collapses. She could not stomach their pity—disgust, in many cases—if they knew.

She has wept and scowled by turns as she lined the sleeve of Robin's tunic with the jewels on her white dress, as she trailed a finger over her younger self's easy smile and wondered for the hundredth time what her life would have been like if only she had allowed Robin to love her. But now, as her eyes move across the completed image, she feels sadness and anger for a whole new reason. Because as she looks at page 23, she does not feel hopeless, robbed, bereft. She thinks of _Maybe it's all about timing _and _follow my heart, to you,_ the way Robin always kisses her with equal parts contentment and desperation, the playful glint in his eyes when he teases out her smile, and she feels…_hope._

And she is sad, and angry, because Regina Mills is not meant for hope. Fate has it another way; fate is determined to destroy her, and this page is a cruel joke, the author laughing in her face for hoping she could ever be that happy.

The page goes in a nearby drawer, and later in her office, a hidden presence, like the letter he once stole from her pocket.

She angers at it sometimes, the pad of her thumb on the number that marks her failure. She was too young, too angry, too afraid, too hurt. Too cruel, to others, and to herself.

She promises herself not to be any of those things now.

And she hopes.


End file.
